Electrical Wiring

When I was about 8 I helped my father build a house that we lived in. This is when I did my first residential electrical wiring work. I did not get back to electrical wiring until I built out my first indoor greenhouse in 2008. Since then I have picked up projects here and there. Some day I will go and take the test and ask all of my previous employers to sign off on my electrical work hours.

There is a remote off-grid community living in the hills near Santa Cruz that asked me for electrical support recently. They have a few structures with no municipal services, they source their water from local springs, pack their trash, and are in the process of upgrading their generator based power plant to a solar one. I traced, documented, and landed the branch circuits for the common house in a breaker box.

I worked on cleaning out and adding a few 120v branch circuits to supply power to lights and outlets in a bus. Future versions will add current monitoring, automated fan operation, and environmental monitoring

I live in a a really nice cottage behind the house of my roommates. When I moved in a lot needed to be done to modernize and I took the opportunity to learn more about general construction, electrical installations, and industrial wiring concepts.

There are 3-way and 4-way relays on the control panel with sane fail-safes allowing for manual over ride. Setting up this development interface and getting it on the network with a static address was today's progress to having a smarter shack.

New Orleans has been ravaged by racism and natural disaster (references). It is also a hotspot for traveling punk community and anarchists looking for a lawless place to call home. A few years ago I helped a friend upgrade their existing solar electrical wiring, and recently visited hoping to continue those efforts. No hep was needed there, but I was able to lend a hand at the other anarchist squat across town by repairing a "knicked" wire with a code-compliant J-Box. While this was not much work I did take the opportunity to audit the wiring done there by a real professional.

The wiring harness and a few attached components have been acting funny on a 88' Suzuki VS1400 Intruder I have been working on. I was able to restore
horn and turn signal functionality after replacing the entire control switch. Re-soldering the connections that had failed inside only resolved the issue for a short period.